Olympic Gold Medals Are Made Up Mostly of Silver Next week in London, athletes from around the world will go for the gold. But as it turns out, the Olympic gold medal is mostly made of silver. Weighing in at 412 grams -- or roughly the weight of a can of green beans -- the gold medal is made up of only 1.34%, or about 6 grams of gold. The rest is comprised of 93% silver and 6% copper. The 2012 Olympic medals were made from nearly nine tons of metal from Rio Tinto's Kennecott Utah Copper mine in Salt Lake City and its Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/olympic-gold-medals-made-mostly-111600613.html
Cool info. I did a little quick math and if it was made out of solid gold it would be worth over 20000 dollars. Wow.
If I did my math right, it would cost the hosting country $343M to make the medals out of gold. Yikes. Dave
I just read that story from a link from coinflation. I think its wrong. I distinctly remember in the 80's they changed back to solid gold medals for a while since gold was down. I don't think the statement "no gold medals have been solid gold since 1912" is correct.
The athletes only want gold because it gets them more endorsement money so they can be in cereal commercials and so on, along with bragging rights they are the best in the world at what they did. The medals themselves are just conversation starters that sit on top of fire place mantles. :thumb: I could understand why these wouldn't be made mostly of gold, the costs are too high for sure.
Just as an update, I found this: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/27154056/COMPOSITION-OF-THE-MEDALS-OF-THE-OLYMPIC-GAMES 1992 and 1996 were NOT silver covered with gold, they were all gold. I didn't think that story sounded right, but its repeated all over the internet. Just goes to prove never trust anything on the internet.
The above link (docstoc) wants a LOGIN to view the article. I remember from some time in the 1960's somebody wrote to a coin magazine asking whether US Olympic athletes could bring their gold medals into the US then. Bringing foreign gold into the US was illegal then. Somebody replied that the medals weren't really gold but plated, so bringing them to the US was legal.
Strange, I just tried it out, and I could view the document just fine (login was required for downloading though). As for the gold content of a "gold" medal, the IOC only has some minimum requirements, e.g. diameter at least 60 mm, minimum thickness 3 mm thick - and the medal for the winner must be "gilded with at least 6 grams of pure gold" ... Christian
If a medal that size is made out of gold it will be around 720 grams in weight which make it worth much more than 20k
